With the development of mobile communications technologies and the popularization of computer technologies, location-based service (LBS) technology enters into people's daily lives. By using the LBS technology, the location of a mobile terminal may be acquired by positioning the mobile terminal, and then location-dependent services are provided for the mobile terminal. For example, by using the LBS technology, the location of the mobile terminal may be acquired by means of a positioning device such as a GPS, and, within a certain distance range nearby, the mobile terminal may search and/or select a location, names and addresses of a nearby building or storefront, such as a hotel, a cinema, a mall, a gas station or the like.
In recent years, with the rapid development of the LBS technology, new applications based on the LBS technology have been developed. One of these applications is geo-fencing technology. In the geo-fencing technology, a geo-fence may be formed by a virtual fence. When the mobile terminal enters into or leaves the geo-fence, or acts within the geo-fence, a notification or a prompt corresponding to the geo-fence may be received. As another example, in a location-based social network, the geo-fencing technology may be used for assisting a user in automatic registration when the user enters into a certain region.
With some existing techniques, to execute the foregoing applications with geo-fencing, the mobile terminal needs to determine a location positioning according to a preset positioning interval, and then it is determined whether the mobile terminal enters into a certain geo-fence.
With these existing techniques, the positioning interval of a mobile terminal is preset, which is typically an empirical value. In order to ensure a recognition rate of a geo-fence, the positioning interval cannot be preset too large, otherwise, it may result in the mobile terminal consuming too much power and network data flow. In addition, when the mobile terminal gets closer to the geo-fence, the preset positioning interval may also determine that it is unable to timely and accurately recognize the geo-fence, thus the recognition rate of the geo-fence is reduced.